[An American novelist, essayist, short story writer, and scriptwriter, Johnson is best known for his novel Middle Passage (1990), which earned him a National Book Award. In the essay below, he offers high praise for Ellison and his writings.]

"What on earth was hiding behind the face of things?" the Everyman narrator of Invisible Man asks himself in Ralph Ellison's perennial masterpiece. His unique dilemma, and ours, is the formidable task of freeing himself from the blinding social illusions that render races and individuals invisible to each other. Only after a harrowing, roller coaster ride of betrayals and revelations above and below America's 20th century intellectual landscape does he achieve the liberating discovery that, for all the ideologies we impose upon experience, we cannot escape the chaos, the mysterious, untamed life that churns beneath...